This piece is free to read without a subscription.
You don’t appreciate fairy tales until you’ve seen the cruelty of the world.
We kids wanted to be rebels. I wanted the witch to boil the children, I wanted to see Luke get downed in his fighter. I wanted Superman to fall into kryptonite. Rebelliousness may be a curse that lives within me I suppose. But life isn’t full of the wins you take for granted in a kids’ movie. Gumption and ambition carry you here, not virtue. Modernity tries again and again to snuff out good men, the kind of men you find beating the villain on Saturday morning. Try as it might, though, it never can fully complete this task.
I think of my friend Andy. Andy is in many ways a Prince Myshkin, the almost impossibly good-hearted central character of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Andy didn’t have the best home life. He never had much support to speak of and found himself alone on the Great Plains. He got lied to by a recruiter and ended up doing menial work in the dredges of an aircraft carrier. In the Navy, Andy dodged knives as he ran afoul of the gangs on ship with his innocent naivete. He’s got a bunch of medals he won’t wear for the bombs other people dropped.
He’s not like me. He never let this world unlock licentiousness and lechery inside him. Like the Prince, he loved all. More than that, like Prince Myshkin bravely taking a beating so an innocent woman would not, he also stands up for what is right, even at great personal cost.
Andy wanted to become a pastor so he could help others. He ended up returning to the service as an infantry officer instead. We all knew his first girlfriend was terrible for him. He made the mistake of living like these fairy tales, he loved with his full heart and gave generously. The whore turned his apartment into a drug den while we were in training two thousand miles away.
As with the Prince, a setback never deterred his heart. In my darkest moments, he was there. When the love of my life left me and I did not eat for three days, he was there to bring a vision of hope to ward off my instinctual reflex of destruction. I wanted to burn the world, he brought me a Bible and good news. But why couldn’t I bring him something good? Something more than jokes and company? Maybe it’s the curse of a flaneur to come bearing nothing. Maybe people who try to make us feel good make us feel bad in turn, because by contrast they remind us of the virtue we lack.
To be good one must be selfless, like Sergeant Alcide in Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s 1932 novel Journey to the End of the Night. Alcide initially appears to us like all of Céline’s characters, as another automaton who’s likely waiting to take advantage of our dear narrator or unleash his rapine nature. Alcide, though, holds a secret. The narrator digs into Alcide’s letters and discovers the terrible truth. Alcide, unlike so many of the others in the novel, has a noble reason to serve on a terrible outpost in the middle of Colonial Africa under terrible men. It was the only way to provide enough support to put his orphaned niece through school. If he quits, she would run out of money before he was able to return to France and get a job. So, Sgt. Alcide is a prisoner of his own good heart, trapped with his terrible secret.
These are the stories we find when we move from Saturday morning cartoons to works imbued with the pain of the human condition.
Céline says he wishes good people had a mark on them so we knew they were pure of heart. I think they do, and I think it's what destroys Andy. I think it's why my equally righteous compatriot, Kurt, had his wife leave him on a whim. In fact, I think it's why Lucas and Matt had their wives leave too. Goodness is a mark for the rapacious to pounce upon. But Andy’s not deterred. He still knows love in his heart long after mine went cold and vicious. I want to be like him, but I fear for him. I’ve watched woman after woman use and abuse him. I know his new wife just wants his green card. She’s his full-on wife and she won’t even post a picture with him or mention him on her very active social media. He takes pride in being a father to another’s child, a kid otherwise doomed to a bad fate. I just see him being used as a free pass to the American life.
Maybe things were always this way, maybe kindness always was weakness in the grand scheme of things. But I refuse to fully believe that. There would be no monuments to greatness if we only celebrated evil. We’d still be in our longhouse villages chucking rocks at each other if not for higher virtue. I fear for Andy, I fear for this world. I feel the hopeful and the cynical pulling at me in turn.
Teach me to love recklessly like you but to maintain my caution. I pray for you, and I pray for our world. I now know why we have fairy tales. I know that for the good to exist we must believe righteousness can win on this Earth. I believe in heroes, so help me to believe in happy endings, too. Let me no longer prevaricate the manners of my heart. Let heroes win and let the good like Andy find goodness in return in this world, instead of treachery.
“Since it is so likely that [children] will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.”- C.S. Lewis
Behind the Scenes
As part of our commitment to keep all our essays and stories free, we ask our authors to pull back the curtain and share a little bit about their writing process and intent as a bonus for paying members.
You can find an explanation and reflection from the author of this piece just below…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Futurist Letters to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
 | A guest post by
|